1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image search apparatus, an image scanning apparatus, an image search system, a database creation method, and a non-transitory computer-readable recording medium encoded with a database creation program. More specifically, the present invention relates to an image search apparatus and an image scanning apparatus for creating a database which stores images scanned by the image scanning apparatus, an image search system including these apparatuses, a database creation method executed in the image search apparatus, and a non-transitory computer-readable recording medium encoded with a database creation program.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the storage capacity of servers has been increasing, enabling user to store more images. When many images are stored, they have to be databased. Information is then required to search images. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-12024 discloses an image search apparatus which determines similarities based on the features of images and searches images. However, when images are compared entirely, the areas to be compared are so large that the load on search processing is heavy.
On the other hand, with the progress of network techniques, it is expected that a system is constructed such that an image search apparatus having a database and an image scanning apparatus receiving input of images to be searched are connected with each other via a network. In this case, the image input to the image scanning apparatus has to be transmitted to the image search apparatus over the network. However, the data amount of images is relatively large, thereby increasing the communication load in transmitting images.